Teachers and students can benefit from knowing techniques of memory champions

Basically you just record couple of different versions of a song/play/whatever and then listen to it. She explains the technique on the video.

It's a good idea to spend some time pre-calculating mnemonic images for names before you are in a social situation where you need to use them.

Find lists of the most common first names and surnames and prepare against random combinations of those.

This process will also help you get better at doing it for the less common names on the fly.